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Today Congressman David Scott (GA-13) delivered the following remarks on the House Floor in strong opposition to H.R. 3823, a Republican measure that began as a bill to reauthorize the FAA but evolved to include cherry-picked,  insufficient flood insurance reform.

Click here to watch video of Congressman Scott’s remarks.

Mr. Speaker, let me start off by letting the America people know fully why we Democrats on this side of the aisle are opposed to this bill.

Nobody has worked as hard as Democrats on this bill, Mr. Speaker, but the reason we object to it is that the flood insurance part of this bill was a result of cherry-picking items that they wanted. The American people deserve better than that. Then they attach it to an FAA bill with a 6-month extension. That is no way to treat the issues that we have today.

All you have got to do is click on the television and look at what is happening to American citizens in Puerto Rico, Florida, Texas. And you are going to put something where they cherry-picked this together to solve this particular problem?

There is no sense of urgency here, Mr. Speaker.

Another reason is that, unlike all of our other disaster tax credit relief packages, every time we have had an expansion added to the bill, we expanded these tax credits for low-income people, expanded the tax credits for the new markets area for people to immediately come in and invest. Not in this bill. There is no expansion in this bill.

My friends over there talk about bipartisanship. My middle name is bipartisanship. There is nobody on that committee who works harder for bipartisanship than David Scott.

But the one piece of bipartisanship--our amendment that I worked feverishly on with the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Duffy), in which we were able to address the issue of the penalties of expense on those poor people who chose to have their monthly installments there and not be punished for it.”